I need sync for just photos on my phone (which Apple or Google are better for), and a small number of esigned PDFs and tax documents (for which any provider's free tier suffices).

Dropbox solved a problem of the 2010s.

With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with.

Being able to set local and not-local flags on files/folders is great.

I spent some time trying to use a few of their alternatives, plus their mobile client apps, and it's kinda just Dropbox still.

On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters. All I care about is packrat and good syncing. Is there anybody that loves anything they've built in the last fifteen years? I feel like the company could have had a skeleton crew keeping the lights on and I wouldn't have noticed a thing.

Now, in 2026, all I want is for my coding agent to be able to grep the files in dropbox. Feel like dropbox will sooner rely on selling merch than offer something useful like that, though.

Box.com, which is quite similar, is not that different. Around $3B and $1.2B in income. Similar valuation.

I think it is the market, not the leadership.

It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple (iCloud), Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive).

Not sure where to go since the big guys won't acquire you given that they have alternatives. Maybe a business software acquirer like Salesforce or Dell? Or an AI company that would use this type of cloud storage as a AI document store / collaboration hub?

I honestly do not know where to go.

Almost none of them had Dropbox accounts.

I found out later from someone that 90% of them couldn’t access the files. The link didn’t require a login but they made it look to the unsophisticated observer that you need an account to get the files. So these folks (most of them were elderly), just gave up.

Drew launched a great new product, fine tuned it to be one of most loved and then made profitable company. Respect

I feel like they left a lot of money on the table.

I'm all-in on the apple ecosystem, so while it's not perfect, iCloud storage works better. Was a shame, though.

At a certain point (mid-2010s) things started to go off the rails from a design, marketing and complexity standpoint. Suddenly having a Dropbox account felt a lot more complicated - so I stopped using it.

The change was almost hard to describe, but I think it's encapsulated well if you compare the Dropbox homepage from, say, 2013 to 2019.

2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20130701190140/https://www.dropb...

2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20191130224813/https://www.dropb...

I realize that companies that want to become large behemoths naturally seem to have to go down this path - just saying I miss the simplicity of it in its earlier form!

The constant marketing for "dropbox for business" (which is priced badly and is not something I've ever felt comfortable recommending to any business) was also quite irritating.

And even despite enjoying their service, if Google Drive produced a Windows integration that actually worked well, I'd leave for it in a minute.

I'd never use OneDrive, but that's more out of spite at Microsoft shoving it at me than because it is bad in any way I know of clearly.

Open to recommendations...

All the best to their employees, but I think a big round of layoffs will be coming within the next couple of quarters.

It’s stable and profitable (which is more than can be said of most tech companies these days), but the stock is basically flat since it’s IPO a decade ago.

Guy has pipes.

Oh his software was pretty good too.

Jobs was ultimately right in the end.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-most-people-like-Dropbox

technically he's rich enough to never work again. but he's hungry, young & smart

& can really push the industry forward - by taking one of the f500 that's tech adjacent & be CTO

Things have reached the point where I probably could use open sync+storage options to achieve what I do with Dropbox (and perhaps eventually I will do that as a hedge against the risks of Dropbox enshitification).

But I'd love to see Dropbox continue to provide worthy convenient service.

it's very good + super fast.

They’ve dragged their feet on evolving and offer nothing new in almost a decade.

Just musing....

Now the native file sync is a really doomed space for individual customers (because I have never explored what's out there exclusively for enterprise). Dropbox is well Dropbox New. Anyone in their right minds, or if anyone has a device other than an Apple device, will not even think of relying on the (even after years of complaints) opaque and buggy iCloud. Google Drive, while most reliable technically, is a really bad bet as a filesystem file sync tool; besides, they are much more bloated than Dropbox, and their suite offerings are intertwined with it so deep. Smaller offerings like Tresorit (though most "native" among its peers) are too buggy and have questionable practices like that of pCloud, etc.

So while the entire personal/consumer filesystem file sync system has gone to the gutter now, Dropbox is still a bad solution among quite worse ones and that's really sad. From storing 100s of GBs at one point, I am back to just ~300 MB in Dropbox now. Just couldn't trust it anymore after it broke my workflows quite a few times and still keeps trying with that sudden pop-up of "Update Available" which is not really an app update (app updates silently in the bg; all hail Electron), that is actually a sly way to make you enable its folder on File Provider API feature. I am sure it is a good feature for many but for heaven's sake the very reason I started using (and still use Dropbox for) is because it syncs my complete files across systems. The lest you can do is not actively try to make me click on it. Besides I don't want any other bloody thing. Just give me that feature, and only that, and take my money and in a native app while we are at it. There are LLMs now, give us back a native app at least.

Seeing the focus on "AI" I am pretty sure very soon I'll have to take even that ~300 MB elsewhere.

PS. Their support is absolutely questionable. I've had a chance to contact them for some bugs. Goodness, it took literally weeks, and dozens of messages, to make them accept it's a bug and even then they didn't really accept they just stopped responding (so I assume they accepted it. Besides it was never fixed :D).

However, in the last handful of years, I've been incredibly disappointed in the stagnation of their products.

Dropbox was the first 'virtual desktop' I created that allowed me to hop into new companies and get going in a seamless way. Beyond just dotfiles, I was able to keep applications too, it was so easy to sync and get everything setup at a new company.

When repl.it came out, I wondered why Dropbox hadn't done that first. There's all sorts of room for innovation here - being able to install the right binaries, perfectly configuring a cloud command line setup, syncing configs, etc.

Photos - I have the majority of phots from my adult life stored on dropbox. But the searching is crap compared to google. It's not easy to share or make albums. Dropbox could have been a mini-social media site, a way to share photos, collages, albums easily with friends - but it has half the features of google photos!

Collaborative Editing - They probably could have done something here too, but I never saw a compelling attempt.

Dropbox is still a great product for file syncing, but I fear that they will slowly lose relevance if they don't get another hit product.

I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is useless. :(

Edit: Thanks unofficial Dropbox support channel; thanks Drew :)

Edit edit: Try my luck with my Apple account now, I guess—Tim Cook, you busy?

What killed them for me was: - idiotic pricing model. You either pay little for little storage or a lot for a lot. Like most people I needed more than a tiny bit and less than a shitton of storage and there was no offering for me - the idiotic decision to not support ARM Macs for a good year. That's what broke the camel's back and I decided to offload to other services only to realise it's not that important who you're with. It's a commodity product - which leads to the last point: Dropbox never found something innovative or interesting to set them apart. They tried a lot of random products, none appealed to me.

Somehow, in my mind, Dropbox is always associated with the classic HN comment [1] about "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, ..." ;-) ;-)

Trivial indeed /s

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224